An archive bureau in northeast China is drawing together experts to decode a vast number of document...

BEIJING, July 3 -- Confessions made by 45 Japanese war criminals tried and convicted by military tribunals in China after World War II (WWII) were published online on Thursday.

Handwritten confessions, along with Chinese translations and abstracts in both Chinese and English, have been published on the website of the State Archives Administration, said the administration's deputy director Li Minghua at a press conference on Thursday.

"These archives are hard evidence of the heinous crimes committed by Japanese imperialism against the Chinese," Li said.

"Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, disregarding historical justice and human conscience, has been openly talking black into white, misleading the public, and beautifying Japanese aggression and its colonial history since he took office," Li told reporters.

"This challenges WWII achievements and the post-WWII international order.

"The administration has made them available online before the 77th anniversary of the July 7 incident to remember history, take history as a mirror, cherish peace... and prevent the replay of such a historical tragedy," Li added.

The July 7 incident, or the Lugouqiao Incident, in 1937 marked the beginning of China's War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression, which lasted eight years.

China began publishing "confessions" of 45 convicted Japanese
World War II criminals on Thursday, officials said, in Beijing's latest
effort to highlight the past amid a territorial dispute between the two.

This file photo shows a man looking at a painting depicting
civilians fleeing Shanghai during the war, at the Museum of the War of
Chinese People's Resistance Against Japanese Aggression in Beijing. (AFP
PHOTO/Frederic J. BROWN)

BEIJING: China began publishing "confessions" of 45
convicted Japanese World War II criminals on Thursday, officials said,
in Beijing's latest effort to highlight the past amid a territorial
dispute between the two.

The documents, handwritten by Japanese
tried and convicted by military courts in China after the war, are being
released one a day for 45 days by the State Archives Administration
(SAA), it said in a statement on its website.

In the first, dated
1954 and 38 pages long, Keiku Suzuki, described as a lieutenant general
and commander of Japan's 117th Division, admitted ordering a Colonel
Taisuke to "burn down the houses of about 800 households and slaughter
1,000 Chinese peasants in a mop-up operation" in the Tangshan area,
according to the official translation.

Among a litany of other
crimes with a total toll in the thousands, he also confessed that he
"cruelly killed 235 Chinese peasants seeking refuge in a village near
Lujiayu".

He also "ordered the Epidemic Prevention and Water Supply Squad to spread cholera virus in three or four villages".

The
document, which is littered with descriptions of "Japanese
imperialists", appeared to have been written by someone with
native-level command of Japanese, said one Japanese journalist who saw
it.

However, some of the sentences were very long and contained
multiple clauses, possibly indicating it had gone through several
drafts.

It was not clear whether Suzuki's or the other
yet-to-be-published confessions -- all of them relating to 45 war
criminals put on trial in China in 1956 -- were previously publicly
available.

Suzuki was held by Soviet forces at the end of the
conflict and transferred to Chinese custody in 1950, earlier Chinese
documents said, adding that he was sentenced to 20 years in prison by
the court and released in 1963.

The publication of the confessions
comes as Tokyo and Beijing are at odds over a territorial dispute in
the East China Sea, and as Beijing has argued that a reinterpretation of
Japan's pacifist constitution could open the door to remilitarisation
of a country it considers insufficiently penitent for its actions in
World War II.

China regularly accuses Japan of failing to face up
to its history of aggression in Asia, criticism that has intensified
since the democratic re-election in December 2012 of Prime Minister
Shinzo Abe, who has advocated a more muscular defence and foreign policy
stance.

China was outraged in December last year when Abe visited
Tokyo's Yasukuni Shrine, where the souls of Japan's war dead, including
several high-level officials executed for war crimes after World War
II, are enshrined.

"These archives are hard evidence of the
heinous crimes committed by Japanese imperialism against the Chinese,"
the SAA's deputy director Li Minghua was quoted as saying by the
official Xinhua news agency.

"Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe,
disregarding historical justice and human conscience, has been openly
talking black into white, misleading the public, and beautifying
Japanese aggression and its colonial history since he took office," Li
said.

The SAA said the documents were being released to mark the
77th anniversary Monday of the Marco Polo Bridge incident, a clash
between Chinese and Japanese troops near Beijing, commemorated as the
start of what is known in China as the War of Resistance Against
Japanese Aggression, which ended with Tokyo's World War II defeat in
1945.